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'DmC Devil May Cry' Review - Part Three: Angels And Bosses (Xbox 360)

The game’s combat is plenty fun, but DmC drops the ball when it comes to boss fights.

Mundus isn’t the final boss in DmC Devil May Cry, and thank goodness for that. It’s like déjà vu all over again. Mundus fights just like the succubus from eight or nine missions back. Even the dual-platform set-up is nearly identical.

The problem with most of the bosses in the Devil May Cry reboot is they’re all for show—they’re big, towering monstrosities but they’re all bile and no bight.

ROUS’s

The bosses also tend to capitalize on the gross-out factor. The idea appears to be: make the boss fights big and cinematic and gross and use that to mask how easy and boring they are.

Speaking of cinematic, how many cut-scenes ought we tolerate in a single boss fight?

I say just one one: right at the beginning. DmC has the annoying habit of inserting cut-scenes everywhere, and boss fights are no exception.

In fact, I think some of the normal enemies provide much more entertaining challenges. The assassins with their ability to teleport and parry are among the best enemies in the game. Better still, they teach you what to expect from the final boss—and the only decent boss in the game—Vergil.

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Vergil is actually a pretty interesting character.

He plays a nice foil to Dante. In the beginning he comes across as the more “together” of the two brothers. Dante is a childish womanizer, a self-obsessed jerk with a devil-may-care attitude about anything and everything. Vergil studied computer programming and spent his days plotting and scheming the downfall of the demons.

The roles twist as the game reaches its climax. Dante has grown up somewhat, has shown that he’s willing to risk himself to save Kat, and that he has little interest in Vergil’s Machiavellian utilitarianism.

Still, I wish we’d had more of this story of brothers and betrayal; I wish Vergil’s role and character had been more fleshed out, and that the final confrontation weren’t so abrupt. Vergil’s declaration of “it’s our time to rule” felt jarring, even with his earlier display of callousness.

Classic Dante

I went ahead and got the costume pack for the game. I prefer Dante with his old mop. Call me sentimental.

Or maybe the new hair-do just accentuates all of new Dante’s worst features. Or makes me feel like telling him to get off my damn lawn.

Whatever the case, the rebooted Dante was a lot more tolerable in the last third of the game than in the first two thirds—the only exception being his banter with Vergil, which makes them both look bad pretty much without fail.

There’s actually a pretty egregious flaw with the costume pack DLC, however: while most cut-scenes show Dante with his new costume, hair, etc. every now and then the vanilla Dante is back. It’s like a slap in the face, a jarring twist of my suspension of disbelief which I’ve worked so tirelessly to preserve.

Angels and Demons

Final question: Wither the angels?

Other than the above-pictured angelic angels, and some not-pictured NSFW Victoria Secret-style angels, the game is basically all about demons and a pair of demon-angel hybrids.

To be fair, I’m probably just picking on DmC at this point. And it’s not just about angels.

We have all the trappings of religion with none of the meat. The easy demon-killing stuff is present in spades, but the uncomfortable religious questions are simply erased from the pallet.

In Diablo III there are essentially no religious themes at all save for the pride of the angels and a big, lavishly animated fight between Diablo and the angel king dude. Diablo is just any other big boss. The angels are just pretty cut-scenes.

But wasn’t it pride that led to the fall of Lucifer in the first place?

Isn’t there a huge amount of thematic marrow for us to suck out and spit into these games? Aren’t there better stories to be told that make us uncomfortable not because of gross-out factors or generic evil things with horns, but because they talk about the darker side of our own humanity?

Now, you might argue that the story in DmC is about the darker side of our humanity. But it isn’t really. The wickedness of the world is mostly explained away as the side-effects of a demon conquest.

The fight between Mundus and Dante sits cozily outside of any of the greater context of the war between Heaven and Hell. The game is, quite literally, stuck in Limbo. And Dante is similarly positioned not as someone too good, too on “the side of angels” but as a rebel, a jerk, an anti-hero. Maybe I’m just too post-post-modern for anti-heroes these days.

Now, perhaps that’s the point. Perhaps we’ve simply set the stage here. But I get the feeling that tackling any sort of actual religious theme is simply too taboo, too risky, for game developers. You see some of it in the foreign indie title Inquisitor, but that game is hardly mainstream and, to be honest, far too tedious and oddly translated even for me.

So we have th only real thematic bogey man in DmC take the shape of capitalism, which is fine but for its heavy-handedness; and in Diablo III…well, I’m not sure there was any deeper theme at play in that game at all.

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“So we have th only real thematic bogey man in DmC take the shape of capitalism, which is fine but for its heavy-handedness; and in Diablo III…well, I’m not sure there was any deeper theme at play in that game at all.”

Hm, I dunno, both of them feature manchildren uttering the f word to fans.

I think the Atlus games such as Shin Megami Tensei and Digital Devil Saga tackle the issue of religious themes and dark side of humanity quite well if you are wondering if there are game developers out there that can do this sort of things in games correctly.

Ah,youve just said Shin Megami Tensei huh? Yes, Atlus classic, most renowned series always tackling with biblical, darker theme about humans fight against powers that is beyond theirs that is demon, angel, and even god. Well, speaking of that, it makes no wonder why Shin Megami Tensei is among the big three of Classic Japanese RPG (the other two are Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy) even though they are the most hardcore of all. Maybe its because the darker theme of the story and hard gameplay.

So yes, Atlus’ SMT series usually do a good job delivering those kind of story. It just shame they didn’t quite get recognized in the west untill Nocturne and Persona series came out.

“Vergil studied computer programming and spent his days plotting and scheming the downfall of the demons.” That sounds so hilariously awful.

One thing that bugs me is that how they used nephilim to describe angel/demon when it seems that it’s mostly used to describe demon/human hybrids (at least there seems to be something about sons of God being fallen angels…?) so that would mean old Dante was a nephilim, right?

Another thing is that how can’t an angel/demon change into either of those forms but was born in his human form, continues to live in human form and even devil trigger can’t turn him into a demon (full potential, blah, blah, blah).

And nothing about angel form, but I guess it’s just angels = humans with wings, hooray. It’s just all so silly.